Black market carnival tickets scam

The Rio de Janeiro carnival attracts more than 2 million visitors every year. What most of these tourists are unaware of is that this world famous annual festival is subsidized by the Brazilian Mafia. The main event of the carnival is the samba parade in the enormous Sambódrome, where beautifully dressed dancers of the samba schools battle for the first prize. These samba schools are paid millions by powerful and extremely wealthy criminals, in order to attract those huge amounts of unsuspecting tourists to the city, where they are an easy prey for the scams run by these criminal organizations. One of the main moneymakers for these scammers are the black market tickets, which can be sold for hundreds of Dollars to tourists eager to experience the famous Rio samba parade.

These wealthy criminals buy up the bulk load of the tickets to the carnival samba parade and other supporting festivals as soon as they become available. They then hold on to them to create a shortage in available tickets. Demand for these tickets will explode in the weeks and days before the parade, when all tickets via the official channels have been sold out. This means that the price tourists are prepared to pay will rise quickly, as nobody wants to miss out on the main event when they’ve already come this far. These black market sellers then offer their tickets for sale through fraudulent travel agents all over town at prices of up to tenfold of the original price.

If you want to visit Rio de Janeiro during the annual Carnival, and are planning to attend the samba parade, make sure you book your tickets well in advance at a reputable online ticket agent, or if you have local friends or relatives, let them buy the tickets for you, also well in advance, before the official travel agents run out of their honest tickets.